February is National Heart Month: Is From My Mother’s Heart to Yours: 5 Tips to Rethinking Wellness

Moms, it is too easy to desire healthy lifestyles for our children yet even harder to remain consistent in promoting those desires. Here are a few tips that I hope will help you in instilling healthy lifestyle choices in your children.

Forget “Do what I say and not what I do” when trying to get children to eat well and live well. Home wellness begins with you and what you do. If you make eating well and exercising look like fun, then they will adapt the same good attitude. Children mimic what they see and hear.

Treats are a privilege. Most of us growing up received sugary treats as a part of ritual like Sunday dinner desserts or the occasional candy bar. These days, treats are used as rewards and sometimes given to kids just because. In truth, treats are a privilege that children living in poverty or in third world countries with a lack of food resources will never know. Treats bear little to no nutritional value beyond fresh fruit.

I am a nurse who has seen one too many child burdened by diseases exacerbated by horrible diets. Children with great diets and who have diseases like Sickle Cell or diabetes have great survival rates and even the habits they need to take into a healthy adulthood. Poor food choices affect the effectiveness of medications. Change those diets and tell your sick child “I want you to live and live well.”

Exercise is not complicated activity. If you are not sports-oriented or interested in calisthenics, then it’s okay because there are activities that are simpler: Like walking. Don’t always park near an entrance of a mall or store, park far away to get in some extra walking. Dance too. Put on some kid-friendly music and wiggle with them for an hour (30 minutes even) per week. The point is find the one thing that YOU like and commit to.

Wellness is not simply eating well and exercising. It is about thinking well and positively. It is about creating a lifestyle that has long-lasting results.

We’ve seen enough examples in our own families of unhealthy thinking, eating and living, haven’t we? My heart says to your heart that it’s time to make wellness decisions that last throughout the ages and that benefit our children and then their children.